We’re almost there with the vegetable garden as this morning we got around to planting the Jet Set onion sets in the bed between the shed and the greenhouse. We spread an old piece of garden fleece over them because we always get a few pulled up by the birds. We push them back in again but until the sets start sprouting we have to take a guess as to whereabouts they came out so we end up with a few gaps and a few being overcrowded.
First Swallow
It felt like the start of summer today as we looked out and saw our first swallows, a pair of them, perched on the telephone wires. They stayed there for more than two hours. I’m sorry that I haven’t got a suitable barn or outbuilding for them to nest in.
We found a fresh hedgehog dropping this morning, on the end slab of the top of the low retaining wall of herb bed, nearest to the house. Less welcome, but seemingly inevitable, Barbara says she’s also spotted rat droppings as she edged the lawn. Yesterday our next door neighbours found a dead one at the end of their garden.
Biscuit, the pony with attitude, hasn’t made an appearance in my sketchbook recently. Apparently he has been sold. If Biscuit had been a player on my team, he would definitely have been up for free transfer. But I’ll miss him.
The nestbox as it was when new. It needs a clear out inside as I didn’t get around to doing that during last winter.
Latest from the blue tit box on the patio; blue tits were in and out of it a couple of weeks ago. A house sparrow briefly investigated it but all we’ve seen in the last week is an occasional bumble bee hovering by the entrance hole and going inside.
For the first time in forty years as a freelance I got my accounts started, finished and even submitted my tax return online in just one day. They’re simple enough – working out the proportion of printing costs against book sales is as complicated as it gets – but in previous years there always seemed to be one mystery item that would hold me up.
Now I haven’t got that hanging over me, perhaps I’ll feel more freedom to get off and draw.
Was this outbuilding at the Ship Inn at ‘the Brig’ (Horbury Bridge), a barn or a stables? As there is a pulley to the left of the upper door/hatch could it have been a warehouse? Perhaps it was connected with the woollen or rag trade?
The lean-to, if we can judge by that matching window, appears to be part of the original building but the extension at the back looks like a later addition.
Twenty or thirty years ago the upper storey was used as a loft for fantail pigeons. The entrance hatch and landing platform are still there in the middle of the upper door.
As I said the other day, there’s supposed to be a unique ladder or staircase inside but, from this side of the surrounding fence, I haven’t been able to spot it as the demolition continues.
I can see that the inner wall is modern-looking brick, the roof timbers sawn timber, so it is probably early twentieth century rather than early Victorian or Georgian. We can be sure that the stone-built, flag-roofed Ship Inn is at least 150 years old because it gets a mention (an unfavourable mention!) in Baring-Gould’s account of Horbury Bridge in 1864.
Middups and Shippon
What a shame that they’re demolishing this building that has been part of the townscape for so long. This was originally the rear of the inn, as you can see in the map below. The present main Wakefield to Huddersfield road through Horbury Bridge dates from the mid-twentieth century.
The field behind the Ship Inn was known as the Middups. Perhaps, like the place name Midhope this meant a secluded field in the middle of a valley.
It was in this field that local weaver and talented musician David Turton calmed a bellowing bull by tuning up his bass viol and playing a chorus from Handel.
The Ship sounds a likely name for an inn next to an inland waterway but alternatively it might refer to a shippon or cow shed.
Horbury Bridge 1906
Ordnance Survey map of Horbury Bridge in 1906 superimposed on an Apple Maps aerial view. The old ‘barn’ marked in yellow.Horbury Bridge, Ordnance Survey 1906
My thanks to Paul Spencer who pointed out, via Twitter, that there was a blacksmith’s close to the old ‘barn’. He sent me a copy of the Ordnance Survey map of Horbury Bridge for 1906 which I’ve superimposed on a present day aerial view. The ‘barn’, which I’ve highlighted in yellow, isn’t shown on the 1906 map but its footprint doesn’t overlap the older building – long demolished – immediately to the north, so it could be a century old.
Aerial view from the Apple Maps app. Note the new road which dates from the mid-twentieth century.
I’ve always wondered exactly how the Old Cut, abandoned and filled in during the twentieth century, fitted in to the layout of the Brig.
The river bridge of the early twentieth century was narrower than the modern version and crossed the river at a slightly different alignment.
Link; Account by Baring-Gould ofthe story of David Turton and the bull. This doesn’t mention that this took place in the field known as the Middups. My source for that was Horbury man Bernard Larrad, born (c. 1895-1980), who also told me that he had a photograph of himself as a baby sitting on Baring-Gould’s knee. Why he was so honoured wasn’t explained. As far as I remember, Bernard didn’t claim to be related to Baring-Gould.
It’s been a beautiful day, sunny and settled; perfect for making progress with the veg beds. We’re concentrating on getting our failsafe regular crops in. Broads beans last week, Vivaldi potatoes, beetroot and perpetual spinach today. We also sowed a row of radishes but I wouldn’t describe them as failsafe, perhaps because if they do take and don’t get perforated by flea beetle we invariably miss them at their best.
We’ve cleared all three of our raised beds including the one with the leeks in. The freezer is now full to capacity after Barbara managed to fit in several bags of chopped leeks. It’s hardly the time of year for leek soup so hopefully we’ll find something else that we can make with them.
These three fragments of pottery which we found while digging the lower veg bed must date from well before our house was built in the late 1930s. Perhaps they were mixed in with a wagonload of night-soil (contents of a privy) that was dumped on the field in Victorian times.
Cross section of edge of a blue and white platter?
The blue and white design was the first to catch my eye. It was only when I took a macro photograph of the crazed white potshard that I spotted that it too has spots of blue glaze on it. A cross section reveals that both shards are made of the same kind of clay and are the same thickness. Both are very slightly curved so I think these are both pieces of a semi-rectangular, tray-like platter.
The earthenware has an almost imperceptible curve on it too. Perhaps it was part of a large jar or bottle.
A view of the cross-section appears to show that it was made of two distinct layers of clay but in close-up you can see that the outer, darker layer fades towards the lighter inner layer. Is this an differential effect due to the way it was fired in the kiln?
It appears to have a light grey glaze on its outer surface. Perhaps it was slip-coated.
A sparrowhawk swoops down across my mum’s leafy back garden and perches in a tall fir, its head hidden amongst the branches as I draw it. In a neighbouring garden the tall lime trees have yet to start springing into leaf.
Heading back from a book delivery, leaving motorway and ring-roads behind us we once again use the Peak District as the perfect escape route from everyday routine. We’ve called at the Riverlife Cafe at Bamford many times before but today we’re in luck and we spot new bird for our Riverlife Cafe list. A dipper flits downstream to perch on a fallen bough at the edge of the river. It flies a short way back upstream to a partially submerged bough then launches itself into the fast-flowing water. I don’t see it again until it pops up near the fallen bough, five or six metres downstream.
As we wait for our cinnamon toast and lattes, I draw siskin and coal tit.
At this time of year everything seems possible in the garden. There’s still time to plant whatever we want to grow. Perhaps if I spent as much time gardening as I do getting myself inspired by reading about it and watching Gardener’s World, I’d get a bit further.
Veg beds as they were in 2009 and 2012, which, as we try to keep to a three year rotation, is pretty much what we’re aiming for this year.
I’ve enjoyed two recent books which offer different approaches to which varieties of vegetables to grow and how to grow them. Kew on a Plate takes the view that for taste we might try going back to the heritage fruit and vegetables that predate the standardised, high-yield varieties required by the supermarkets. There’s been a tendency to go for varieties with a long shelf life, which are tough enough to survive transportation, but that doesn’t always go hand in hand with improved taste. But things are changing and most supermarkets are now making efforts to offer a range of locally grown produce.
The book tells the story of the project to reestablish the Royal kitchen garden at Kew. One problem that the gardeners had was with the heritage soft fruits which attracted the attention of grey squirrels, foxes and probably even a few human visitors who found them just too tempting.
Raymond Blanc devised the recipes, often inspired by his memories of the kitchen garden of his childhood in a village in Franche-Comté, eastern France.
In Grow for Flavour, James Wong takes a rather different view. For instance he reminds us that it’s not always true that heritage varieties are the tastiest.
He looks at simple ways to boost flavour, for instance by cutting down on watering. Overwatering results in bigger fruits and vegetables but often at the cost of diluting the flavour.
Trials have demonstrated that it’s possible to get improved results by deliberately putting a plant under a modest amount of stress, by tricking it, for instance, into thinking that it should start producing more fruit or into protecting itself from attack by pests, sometimes producing bitter-tasting compounds which result in a more complex flavour.
Grow for Flavour seeds are available from Sutton’s who also produce a Stacks of Flavour Crate Collection with all you need to grow salad leaves in three weeks, or if you’re more patient, a Pizzabox Crate in which you can grow the entire topping for a pizza in 8 to 10 weeks – blight resistant tomato, basil and oregano (pepperoni not included). You can even have your crate personalised with a message.
No dawn chorus this morning or if there is we’re not going to hear above the whistling, rattling wind but at 4.30 we hear the recycling bin, which we’ve put out on the pavement, blow over. I don’t want any paperwork I might have put in there blowing down the road so I pull on some jeans and grab my jacket and wedge it back under the lamp-post. But it blows over again 15 minute later so I have to trot out again and bring back to the shelter of the porch until breakfast time.
Smeath House, Horbury, my home for twenty years, right through my school and art college days, went on the market today. Looking at Tim Baker’s photographs in the brochure, I can see that the ambience of the place had an effect on the way my work developed. Aged nine, I filled an exercise book with sketches and nature notes including a map of the birds I saw around the shrubberies and lawns.
I can see why I’ve always been fascinated by the Victorian period, surrounded as I was by so many period features. In the 1960s there were still people around, my grandparents for instance, who grew up in the last days of Victorian England. Our era seemed rather colourless and mundane compared with the world of Dickens and Thomas Hardy.
Grandma and Grandad Bell visiting us at Smeath. They met at the celebrations for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee.
The house was built by the Baines family who were worsted spinners with mills in the valley below. There’s a box-shaped bay window on the west-facing corner of Smeath House which my brother imagines Richard Baines standing at early each morning to check that his foreman had stoked up the fire for the steam engine that drove the machinery.
We met Enid Baines, a daughter of the family, in the late 1950s or early 1960s when she revisited Smeath House. Her mum was then aged 100 but didn’t come with her. I would love to have seen any family photographs showing Smeath House in its Victorian heyday.
We’re almost there with the vegetable garden as this morning we got around to planting the Jet Set onion sets in the bed between the shed and the greenhouse. We spread an old piece of garden fleece over them because we always get a few pulled up by the birds. We push them back in again but until the sets start sprouting we have to take a guess as to whereabouts they came out so we end up with a few gaps and a few being overcrowded.
It felt like the start of summer today as we looked out and saw our first swallows, a pair of them, perched on the telephone wires. They stayed there for more than two hours. I’m sorry that I haven’t got a suitable barn or outbuilding for them to nest in.
We found a fresh hedgehog dropping this morning, on the end slab of the top of the low retaining wall of herb bed, nearest to the house. Less welcome, but seemingly inevitable, 
Barbara says she’s also spotted rat droppings as she edged the lawn. Yesterday our next door neighbours found a dead one at the end of their garden.
but in previous years there always seemed to be one mystery item that would hold me up.
